Tradition and Modernity in 20th Century Chinese Poetry

摘要

Scholars of Chinese literature note that China's tumultuous literary history in the 20th century centered around the uncomfortable tensions between tradition and modernity. In this corpus study, we develop and automatically extract three features to show that the classical character of Chinese poetry decreased across the century. We also find that Taiwan poets constitute a surprising exception to the trend, demonstrating an unusually strong connection to classical diction in their work as late as the '50s and '60s.